After a frustrating weekend of ADSL outages a couple of weeks ago,
thanks either to my ISP or, more likely, their upstream provider (the
Australian Monopoly Telco Who Shall Not Be Named), I started hunting
around for a new ISP. Just on a whim, I checked my exchange on the
ADSL2+ roll-out status page at iiNet. And lo! It’s available!

So I signed up for their standard plan, which gives me “up to” 24Mbps
and 10GB download per month (plus another 10GB off peak). Given that I
haven’t had to try too hard to keep within my current 5GB (+5GB) plan,
and iiNet’s 10+10 is $20/mo less, it seemed like a good place to
start. I also get their local phone service (bundled with ADSL2+) and
VoIP, which should be interesting.

The downside of upgrading from ADSL to ADLS2+ is that there’s no “fast
churn”. In other words, I had to disconnect my current service and
then wait for the new one to be provisioned. But now it’s active! (And
only three business days later, which is better than I expected.)

I don’t have the new ADSL2+ modem yet, but even with my current modem
(a Netcomm NB1300) I’ve seen download speeds of about 380KBps
(that’s bytes there sonny), which is fairly impressive. Uploads are
going at about 60-80KBps, which is a lot better than the old 24KBps.
My line attentuation is hovering around the 50dB mark according to the
NB1300, which I’m led to believe means I probably won’t get much more
than 10Mbps anyway, but we’ll see how it goes when the new modem
arrives.

It’s amazing how long five days felt without ‘net connectivity,
though… :-D